Sharing Sources of Inspiration

We cannot adequately describe how any person, idea or event influences us or will influence us in a deeply meaningful way, any more than we can adequately describe a loving relationship or how it will unfold. But we can certainly honor those individuals, ideas, and events that we believe nurture our lives by sharing our awareness of them with others. Here are a few items (which will be updated periodically) that I believe provides the kind of fundamental spiritual wisdom we need to nourish us on an ongoing basis.

The highest to which we can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes us wonder, let us be content; nothing higher can be given, and nothing further need be sought; here is the limit.

All thinking, all experience, all knowledge is inevitably partial; therefore, thought cannot solve the many problems that we have. You may try to reason logically, sanely, about these many problems, but if you observe your own mind you will see that your thinking is conditioned by your circumstances, by the culture in which you were born, by the food you eat, by the climate you live in, by the newspapers you read, by the pressures and influences of your daily life.

So we must understand very clearly that our thinking is the response of memory, and memory is mechanistic. Knowledge is ever incomplete, and all thinking born of knowledge is limited, partial, never free. So there is no freedom of thought. But we can begin to discover a freedom which is not a process of thought, and in which the mind is simply aware of all its conflicts and of all the influences impinging upon it.

From: J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life (1995), meditation for Sept. 12

True forgiveness is beyond the will alone—rising as the expression of inner freedom, it comes from the greater consciousness beyond the personality and ego-driven mind.

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Birth and death are the most sacred of thresholds. You can only feel intense humility and reverence before the mystery of these transitions that transcend the ordinary personality and the mind. As mystery presses close, there is a profound opening to grace. You begin to realize the truth of what all the mystical traditions teach—death is not the loss of the physical body but the mind-made separation from the Spirit. The only death we ever know is to become unconscious of the true immensity of life.

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Diversity is holy. The dazzling play of relationship within the diversity of form is the expression of the inherent sacredness of life.